Day by day I talked to Hildred about Cuthbert, and told her how proud she would be of him when he came home safe from the wars. And Hildred believed all I said. It was easy to comfort her for the moment, only the next day it was all to do over again. I used to build gorgeous castles in the air for her, feeling all the time that it would half break my heart to see any of them come true. Yet there was a pleasure too in watching Hildred, listening with her eyes bent down, and the long dark lashes that made her face look like a cloudy day sweeping her cheeks despondently. And when at last she raised them it was just as if the sun came out suddenly. She was like a child to talk to. I sometimes thought, what a slight thing she was for two strong men to have set their hearts upon.
And thus a long time slipped away. Cuthbert left us in the summer, and winter was well on before Hildred got her first letter from him. That letter, written at sea and sent home by a vessel which met theirs, how much we all thought of it!
We stood round Hildred, waiting for news, as she held the big brown letter in both hands, eager, flushed, and laughing, yet half unwilling to break its great red seal. She unfolded it slowly and read it out, her finger pointing along the lines. It was a beautiful letter—everybody said so—and yet how little it told us about him! It left him well, he wrote, and he liked a soldier's life, but he often remembered home, and thought of his own true love by night and day. And he sent his kind respects to all inquiring friends. That was all.
In time, the letter too became a thing that had come long ago, and the winter dragged on into spring. Hildred grew slowly more accustomed to Cuthbert's absence, and I knew better what a hard task it was that he had left me.
I missed my brother Cuthbert sorely. I had never loved him more than since he took from me unwittingly that which I cared for most in life. With him all the life and cheeriness of our house had gone away—we who remained were so grave and old.
Indeed Granny, the oldest of the three, was the most talkative, perhaps the happiest. The twilight of her life was closing round her, and, looking back over the long way she had come, she could talk cheerfully over what had once troubled her the most, but which now lay dimly remembered in the distance behind her.
Sometimes she reminded me of my mother, by the expressions which she used. And I thought Mistress Dorothy was right when she said that there is a language which the great Master teaches to all his scholars, different as they may be to one another, and that it grows the more easy to them the nearer they are to leaving school and being taken home to their Father's house.
'Stephen will be vexed,' Granny said, 'to think that I should go; but it's quite time, Willie, and I shall be glad;' and she went on, laying her hand on mine, 'To think of me, my dear, poor me, with a golden crown upon my head!'
Dear old Granny, with the white hair under her mob-cap, and her withered, aged face. Ah, well! would not all the lines be smoothed away before the crown of life was laid upon her brow?
It may be that my father saw her failing, and was 'vexed' by it, but he said nothing. Besides, Granny toiled that he should still find a bright fire and tidy room to greet him, and Hildred was always coming in to help her. Granny said the sight of her sweet face made her feel young again. 'Her cheeks are like the red roses that grew over our porch when I was a girl. They used to say I was like one of those roses once, for I was a pretty girl, my dears, though you would not believe it now. I don't think girls are so pretty now-a-days as they used to be when sister Nancy and I were young.'